Vesku
Diamond Member
- Aug 25, 2005
- 3,743
- 28
- 86
It would be nice if the concrete issues with Bulldozer weren't scattered among posts and blogs such as "8 LOLcores" and the like. So far I have not seen any solid criticism of the CMT implementation, even though there is some to be had especially regarding the L1 cache coherency. If anyone knows of some grounded analysis of whether and how AMD can improve Bulldozer's CMT implementation, I would love to read it.
It also keeps the real WTF regarding the years of Bulldozer design unfairly buried. Why would the chip engineers set such high MHz targets? It had bitten them before with previous nodes. It ignores one of the key mistakes Intel made with the Pentium 4. It is actually quite mind-boggling. It feels like they stripped down the Phenom II and then bolted on the cutting edge instructions, with very little plans to improve the core itself and to just rely on adjusting for higher clockspeed per Watt. Was marketing in charge of Bulldozer core design decisions and that's why they got the axe (a bit more Pentium 4 deja vu than I would care for)? Or is it that AMD's core x86 talent pool is so poor they were unwilling to bank on making a better core than Phenom II?
Edit: It seems such an odd design choice that pre-FX launch I thought surely AMD would be getting a 5-15% IPC increase over Phenom II out of a BD module running a single thread.
It also keeps the real WTF regarding the years of Bulldozer design unfairly buried. Why would the chip engineers set such high MHz targets? It had bitten them before with previous nodes. It ignores one of the key mistakes Intel made with the Pentium 4. It is actually quite mind-boggling. It feels like they stripped down the Phenom II and then bolted on the cutting edge instructions, with very little plans to improve the core itself and to just rely on adjusting for higher clockspeed per Watt. Was marketing in charge of Bulldozer core design decisions and that's why they got the axe (a bit more Pentium 4 deja vu than I would care for)? Or is it that AMD's core x86 talent pool is so poor they were unwilling to bank on making a better core than Phenom II?
Edit: It seems such an odd design choice that pre-FX launch I thought surely AMD would be getting a 5-15% IPC increase over Phenom II out of a BD module running a single thread.
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